Thom Rylance: “On stage is the only place in the world where I don’t feel like an alien. It’s the only place where I feel I truly fit in.”

Thom Rylance: “On stage is the only place in the world where I don’t feel like an alien. It’s the only place where I feel I truly fit in.”

A return to a live setting was only minutes away. The echo of the table tennis game going on in the background was what greeted me as I connected over Zoom with the shy and reserved lead singer of The Lottery Winners.

Of course, Thom Rylance is anything but shy and reserved. The larger-than-life character, the frontman of the Leigh four-piece indie band that graced the number one spot on the UK album charts in 2023 with their deeply personal album Anxiety Replacement Therapy. The outward persona that shines so brightly with a microphone in his hand, isn’t the whole story.

The band seemingly comes to life on stage, but for Rylance, it gives him the freedom to express himself in a way he can’t elsewhere.

“On stage is the only place in the world where I don’t feel like an alien. It’s the only place where I feel I truly fit in,” Rylance told me. “For the rest of my life, I’m walking around awkwardly, not sure what to do with my hands. On stage, I know exactly what to do with my hands.”

The Café Indiependent in Scunthorpe on Thursday night, ended a brief hiatus of live gigs. A mini respite from the relentless grind of touring. But it is a return visit that holds a little trepidation to Rylance.

“I’ve got bad PTSD of this venue. The last time we played in Scunthorpe, I snapped my patella in half on that stage,” Rylance relayed to me with customary humour and a little sense of fear. “I carried on with the gig, like Dave Grohl. It was out of place for twenty-four hours and I couldn’t walk for over a month.”

The live arena is where the band truly show what they are capable of. In many ways, they put on a performance. But in the deep, desperate months of Covid times in 2020, it was taken away from them.

The band was just getting established. Their impressive self-titled debut album had just been released. The band that formed over ten years ago had finally seemingly found their place in the unforgiving world that they resided in. There was a risk the band would lose that place was so hard-earned. It could very easily have broken them. But Rylance and the rest of the band didn’t just survive those incredibly tough times, they thrived.

“That was a strange time for everyone, wasn’t it. After ten years, we decided to put out our first album. But then everything stopped literally the week we released that album. We had this decision to make. Either to cry and wallow about it. Which we did a bit. Or, we would pull ourselves together and do something with that time. We spent every single day writing. Every single day, we would go to bed having created something. No matter what it was, either a song, a cover, or a video, I wanted to ensure that we brought something into the world during that time. We were spending more time on Zoom. We were spending more time on that than we ever would together. We were constantly connected.

“We had to embrace it. We had no choice. Otherwise, what would we do? This is all we have ever known. So we made a little TV show, which ended up on Sky. We made loads of friends. We interviewed Frank Turner, and we ended up touring with Frank and recording with him. We ended up interviewing Rick Astley, and now we are going on tour with him. We spoke to Rowetta, and we are now really good friends with her and that kind of helped in getting Shaun Ryder on our record. It was a horrible time for everyone, and I am devastated it was a thing, but the silver lining was that we could at least function in some way as a band because of our determination really.”

Music has saved Rylance. Is that line a little bit overdramatic? Maybe. But it probably isn’t that far removed from the truth. The mental demons were a constant struggle in those early ever so important formative years. A struggle for acceptance. A place where he felt comfortable. But eventually, he found what he needed and the seeds of the band started to flourish.

“I was a bit of a naughty kid, to be honest. I’ve got ADHD and I think the schools didn’t know how to deal with me when I was growing up,” Rylance says. “I was expelled from a couple of schools, and when I got expelled from High School, I got sent to another school, and Rob (Lally) was a proper swat, a proper teacher’s pet. Rob showed me around the school, and that’s where I met him. He played the guitar and he knew I liked music and we became best friends. Similarly, Katie (Lloyd) and Joe (Singleton) were also best friends at school. So we are two sets of best friends that have come together.”

There was an English teacher who saw something in his writing that offered hope his life would later find some meaning. But it would be a music teacher at the Fred Longworth High School in Tyldesley, who changed everything for the young misguided pupil who just needed something to cling onto.

“Mr Asbury was the teacher from the school I got expelled from, and he was the only teacher who ever really fought my corner. He really did change my life. I wasn’t playing music at all until he basically forced a bass guitar on me. He said, “You are taking that guitar home. You are in the school band, and you will turn up every Tuesday,” and I started living for that. I took it home. I taught myself and worked it out, and he just saw something in me that nobody else did. Honestly, Mr Asbury gave me my purpose.”

Rylance writes from experience. And from the heart. The aforementioned number-one album is better because of it. He has previously said that the band is the greatest source of his stress and anxiety, because of his desire to push for the stars. But equally, it is his biggest release from the struggles of his mind.

“Anything that is in a song is a direct experience, and the only way I can expel those feelings and emotions is to put them into a song.” An open and honest Rylance told me. “It’s not hard to write because that is just the way that I deal with things. I’d do that anyway if it was for an album or not. I just kind of write everything down.

“I write the bone of the song, and then I bring it to the band. The way we wrote changed a lot during lockdown. We used to write in a rehearsal room with our instruments. But now I’ll produce the song at home or in the studio, and we write the song as we record it instead of writing first and then recording it, which is how we used to do it.”

Rylance, despite the recent successes of the band, feels there is more to come from the four who seem to have the perfect working relationship. An ambitious quartet that will seek even more from their talents.

“I don’t want to stop,” Rylance told me. “This is all I ever want to do with the rest of my life. We are ticking off these huge achievements and goals, so It’s hard to know what to do next. Jonny Yerrell from The Reytons, who also had a number-one album last year, texted me the night of getting it. He said you will wake up tomorrow, and it will feel weird, and you will be thinking what next, and when you work it out, let me know. I thought, yeah, what do we do now. But I’ve worked it out. We’ve got some plans. We just want to keep going and going and see where we can take this silly little band.”       

You sense The Lottery Winners are a band that is just getting started.

Photo Credit: The Lottery Winners